Whether you know it or not, most websites you visit are slyly tracking you, sending private details, usage patterns, and other data about you to a far away server. It’s a major privacy concern. Stop giving your data to untrustworthy sources with Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new browser extension, Privacy Badger.

The silly name aside, Privacy Badger’s aim is to be a silent protector for regular users, to the extent that you should never need to interact with it. Working in the background, its job is to guard your information from unintentionally being sent to advertisers and malicious third parties.

Privacy Badger also might block some ads, but that is not its purpose. It’s a side effect of blocking tracking elements, so if an ad is trying to send your data back without your consent, the extension will eliminate those trackers as best as possible—sometimes, that results in the whole ad being blocked.

Do You Have to Do Anything?

On most occasions, no. Privacy Badger is meant to work in the background and is supposed to intelligently block trackers, learning as you use it more. However, sometimes it too will break a page in its zeal to protect you. When that happens, you will have to get involved.

Click the Privacy Badger icon and the menu will show you all the elements it has blocked or allowed in a page. You can drag the slider next to any element and set it to red (block completely) or green (allow completely). Privacy Badger also maintains a list of “yellow” elements, which are tracking you but are deemed by EFF to be essential to loading a page correctly. That said, the extension will do its best to stop third-party cookies and referrers from it.

Why Do You Need Privacy Badger?

Privacy Badger also uses EFF’s recently launched Do Not Track (DNT) Policy, which is basically an agreement between web administrators and users to not track, retain and distribute private data, unless the user gives his consent. You can read a plain English version of what DNT means, the long legalese version, or just quickly find out if it’s for you with this table:

“Although we like Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery and similar products (in fact Privacy Badger is based on the ABP code!), none of them are exactly what we were looking for. In our testing, all of them required some custom configuration to block non-consensual trackers. Several of these extensions have business models that we weren’t entirely comfortable with.”

There is some truth to what they say. Ghostery kicked a hornet’s nest a few years ago when users found it that its parent company, Evidon, sells user data to ad companies. Ghostery offers the necessary options to disable this from the user’s side, but you need to actively do that; by default, you will be sending your data to Ghostery, which it can later sell. This conflict of interest has drawn criticism from privacy rights advocates in the past.

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Anonymous

August 14, 2015 at 10:16 pm

Privacy Badger does not use a pre-compiled block list, it detects blockers on its own as it goes. A freshly-installed copy of Privacy Badger will detect very few blockers, but as you rack up more browsing history it will detect more trackers as it notices patterns across the web. That's actually much more intelligent than Ghostery or Disconnect, in my opinion.

Case in point: I've been using Privacy Badger for a little under a week, and it currently detects 16 "potential trackers" on makeuseof.com. 4 domains blocked entirely, 10 domains whose cookies are blocked, and 2 that it's taken no action against.

I tried PB for a couple days in chrome and had to delete it. I like the concept but it slowed down day to day browsing too much for my liking.

I use an adblocker so the majority of trackers that track me to serve advertising are useless because I never see the ads.
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Also of note. If an ad does slip through adblocker it is reported and I generally don't go back to that site because they actively use anti-adblocker technology.

I regard advertising as propaganda of the highest sort and will not allow it into my life if at all possible and avoid those who try and push it on me.

I do not feel guilty at all for doing this because whether I see it or not, I will not buy anything I have seen advertised or promoted to me due to a desire not to have my opinions manipulated for the purpose of business.

I go out of my way to consciously think of what I need and avoid all sorts of behaviors that lead to impulse shopping.

I've been using Privacy Badger for a few months now. I also use Ghostery. Privacy Badger shows one tracking cookie for MUO while Ghostery shows ten different ones. Not bad, only 11 trackers on MUO site.

Privacy Badger is good, I moved over after Ghostery was tracking me and selling my data!

PB needs a block all button at the top when I click the cookie it should move all sliders to the middle and the same for the others. Just checked Drudge report on a new machine and I do not have my rules backed up, so I had to manually click 49 frigging ads to block! Not fun!